Guild Wars 2

Jana.6831:

TorquedSoul.8097:

A daily reset wouldn’t take as long as a weekly reset because no MMR would be taking place. And if if they did merge you could continue to show your EU pride by simply building an all EU alliance.

More likely what would happen is the bracketing of times for For NA and EU if they don’t merge the systems. That is, no 24/7 … it would be more like 12/7.

Calibrating scoring to map population might create too much overhead and is unnecessarily complicated.

I have no idea what MMR is, actually, I just know that it took ~10 mins each time I changed to NA/EU – and I don’t want that on a daily basis.

It’s simple: a 24/7 coverage will never happen. What brought you guys to wanting a 24/7 coverage is oceanic players – EU players won’t save you.
I don’t think calibrating PPT is harder than trying to get 200 players who are used to play at the same time onto a map (NA and EU prime partly overlap as far as I remember). You can however force the merge and see the population drop by 50% because they don’t like it.

I want to keep my server, I want to play on EU, I’m sure those who speak German, French or Spanish would like to keep their servers as well.

I see the potential global team community as a plus not a minus.

But to each their own suppose. :P

I would go but I am just one man (seven toons but one man).

If there is a server that should be a free transfer, IoJ is it.

Anet lets us save IoJ!

Total kill volume this week was 636021.

Attached two charts, kills by server and KDR by server.

Here is this weeks server capture volume for those that are interested.

Global capture volume increased this week 1.4% from 1,267,880 to 1,286,480.

Jana.6831:

TorquedSoul.8097:

The ping doesn’t have to be a problem. If Anet used the EU servers during and around EU prime and NA servers during and around NA prime there would be no ping issue except for those late night players.

This would require a short reset and synchronization a couple times a day but should be doable.

I don’t want the reset every time I’m in wvw (it takes a few minutes) – and I don’t want to be the dog of NA just because they think they can’t play without having a 24/7 coverage – we’re pretty fine without it on EU (although I’d still like a PPT adjustment that depends on how many of each server are currently online).

A daily reset wouldn’t take as long as a weekly reset because no MMR would be taking place. And if if they did merge you could continue to show your EU pride by simply building an all EU alliance.

More likely what would happen is the bracketing of times for For NA and EU if they don’t merge the systems. That is, no 24/7 … it would be more like 12/7.

Calibrating scoring to map population might create too much overhead and is unnecessarily complicated.

To most of us the answer is obvious, yes, capture activity creates the conflict that leads to fights. This doesn’t mean that some people aren’t there just for fights, but that fights are more likely if people are fighting over objectives.

I’ve attached a couple charts (correlation shown at the end of the title). The first shows that as capture activity increases on a server the amount of killing and dying by that server also increases. But some could just write this off as a consequence of increasing population. And since Anet doesn’t give hard numbers on population you could entertain that notion.

The second chart shows that the rate of killing and dying is increasing with the increase capture volume. This means the proportion of killing and death increases with the capture activity of the server. Again you could claim that there are more people involved in fights at higher population so more people die.

There a couple ways we could look at this.

1. People get into fights when trying to capture or defend an objective.
2. People accidentally capture objectives after getting into fights.

Option 2 is ridiculous, of course. Regardless of whether your goal is to capture for points or to capture to create fights, fights revolve around capturing objectives.

If Anet were to remove the incentive to capture objectives, there would be less conflict. While the current PPT system may need to be adjusted, ditching all capture related points is foolish.

In addition, limiting the scope of WvW to something like GvG would also reduce the level of activity as it would remove all the small skirmish fights and ad hoc blob collisions that frequently occur in the WvW arena.

There are always some notable exceptions to these trends. For instance, Far Shiverpeaks and Seafarer’s Rest both have far more fight activity than would be expected for their capture volume. And Sea of Sorrows looks like they don’t care for fights at all.

Dusty Moon.4382:

TorquedSoul.8097:

Dusty Moon.4382:

This is just ridiculous. Now whole guild, from JQ, have left that server and gone to TC to push TC to T1 and let JQ drop. This is just fair weather type of WvW but the usual for these people who like to manipulate glicko. This basically says, to me, that glicko needs to be scrapped.

Any ranking system could be manipulated by redistributing population. Glicko isn’t the problem, population balance is the problem.

For example, you could have a simple ladder ranking system and it to could be manipulated by moving population around.

So … you know Glicko …
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
~Inigo Montoya

I have read the original papers on glicko – had to for stats……… Have you read them?

Yes, I have. Would you like to continue the conversation?

here is some light reading while you think about it:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Error-in-WvW-Glicko-Scoring/

Jana.6831:

Jayne.9251:

TorquedSoul.8097:

Of course merging NA and EU will resolved eliminate most of the problems with timezone imbalances but that is another discussion.

BITE YOUR TONGUE!

Leave EU alone!

Now shoo!

Seconded – Don’t want to have a 200 ping again and also think that not locked tiers are a lot more fun. Solve your problems yourselves or come up with something different than “Let’s destroy Europe” tisk!

ETA: I feel I have to say something on topic:
I think PPT is neccessary – I think the PPK “buff” was a nice add and maybe we should have more of that, but if we scrap PPT completely it wouldn’t be a strategic game mode anymore – and upgraded structures still are important, even if you get waypoints in paper (except SM). When I started to bicker on my former servers because the commander had way more important things to do (chasing a solo roamer f.e.) than defending one of our T3 structures, it was usually: "If you don’t care for your T3 towers, people will stop upgrading. If they stop upgrading the best supply you can get is 500 and with that you can’t “feed” your zerg (for long) and attack anything". If there were no PPT there’d be absolutely no reason to come back from chasing solo roamers, so you’d have much less supply – unfortunately it takes a while until people get all the coherencies.

The ping doesn’t have to be a problem. If Anet used the EU servers during and around EU prime and NA servers during and around NA prime there would be no ping issue except for those late night players.

This would require a short reset and synchronization a couple times a day but should be doable.

Dusty Moon.4382:

This is just ridiculous. Now whole guild, from JQ, have left that server and gone to TC to push TC to T1 and let JQ drop. This is just fair weather type of WvW but the usual for these people who like to manipulate glicko. This basically says, to me, that glicko needs to be scrapped.

Any ranking system could be manipulated by redistributing population. Glicko isn’t the problem, population balance is the problem.

For example, you could have a simple ladder ranking system and it to could be manipulated by moving population around.

So … you know Glicko …
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
~Inigo Montoya

Jayne.9251:

TorquedSoul.8097:

Points per Capture + Points per Upgrade + Points per Kill would probably be a good system. The differences in capture rates are generally pretty small but having scaled rewards for reaching different tiers creates the need to attack and defend.

This would only encourage the EoTM mentality of doing the map in circles — blobbing and nothing but blobbing.

Well that already happens with the current setup. The concern that most have with PPT is that PPT allows massive passive scoring during the off hours. Killing the PPT passive scoring and using only yaks for passive scoring will dramatically reduce the impact of timezone population imbalances.

Backcapping will always happen during high activity periods. Its the nature of the game. Allowing points for upgrades would encourage servers to defend more often and scaling capture points by objective tier would encourage servers to attack higher tier objectives.

Given that yaks are now the deciding factor in upgrades, you could tie points to population by tying the yak spawn rate to relative population.

Of course merging NA and EU will resolved eliminate most of the problems with timezone imbalances but that is another discussion.

Norbe.7630:

TorquedSoul.8097:

please explain how you reach the conclusion about Elo and Glicko being preferred by different types of players.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glicko_rating_system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system

The Glicko rating system and Glicko-2 rating system are methods for assessing a player’s strength in games of skill, such as chess and go. It was invented by Mark Glickman as an improvement of the Elo rating system, and initially intended for the primary use as a chess rating system. Glickman’s principal contribution to measurement is “ratings reliability”, called RD, for ratings deviation.

Both Glicko and Glicko-2 rating systems are under public domain and found implemented on game servers online (like Lichess, Free Internet Chess Server, Chess.com, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, Guild Wars 2).¹ The formulas used for the systems can be found on the Glicko website.

The Elo rating system is a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in competitor-versus-competitor games such as chess. It is named after its creator Arpad Elo, a Hungarian-born American physics professor.

The Elo system was originally invented as an improved chess rating system but is also used as a rating system for multiplayer competition in a number of video games,¹ association football, gridiron football, basketball,² Major League Baseball, competitive programming, Scrabble, and other games.

try to differentiate the games that uses those two ratings and see for yourself
PvP = WvW?
https://youtu.be/Q_JASZZ8xtk

PS: oh theres a thread to explain it to you further
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Porpousal-for-small-roaming

Nothing you posted there addresses the assertion you made of Glicko being preferred by blob fighters or Elo being preferred by more team oriented players.

Here is what I am able to derive from this post.

1. You prefer Elo to Glicko
2. You prefer small group fights to Blob Fights.
3. Things that you don’t like must be related in some way.
4. So people who like blob fights must like Glicko since you don’t like either.

It also seems that the EU WvW kills and deaths are being reset during the NA reset.

Looks like global resets are happening rather than EU or NA kills/death resets.

Norbe.7630:

sarahlynn.6943:

4. Any advice regarding games that have similar systems to WvW?

is this system what you mean?
http://steamcommunity.com/app/570/discussions/0/458604254452226208/

quoted from that site:
“So, why does Valve not use Glicko after calibration and instead switches to Elo? Simple: maintain Glicko and you remove the motivation to play as a team. Implement Elo, and now the team which has become an Elo “entity” has to work as a SINGLE COHERENT entity in order to win. This, in theory, will motivate people to come together and play as a team."

PS: there you have it folks the ones that complains a lot about blobs are glicko type players (which is not wrong due to the fact that current WvW scoring is Glicko 2)

please explain how you reach the conclusion about Elo and Glicko being preferred by different types of players.

They are both basically the same thing only Glicko 2 calibrates for erratic performance in its calculation.

Suggesting that Elo is more team oriented implies that the Elo rating follows the team and not individuals on the team. There are multiplayer implementations of Elo that would allow the same type of individualistic rating scores as Glicko.

Regardless, using Glicko or Elo in WvW would say nothing about preferences for blob fights.

Stand The Wall.6987:

Sirendor.1394:

1.
3.

yeah that works too, although i think ogres would have to be moved a little closer and something would have to be done to prevent spawn camping (multiple paths out of spawn). i wouldnt want the focus to be pve but neither should the map be barren. i think adding some hp sponges are a good thing.

oh i thought you were trying to artificially separate same side groups.

TorquedSoul.8097:

Capture activity drives spontaneous fights. I have data to support this claim. I’m all for Anet giving GvG a place to call home, however I am against destroying the larger strategic WvW concept for simple tactical arena fights.

Alliances fix most of the problems with balance while preserving the strategic component and should be considered before outright ditching WvW for fights fights fights.

im pretty sure our ideas would not impact the core wvw maps at all.

Who is talking about the maps? I’m talking about incentives and factors that drive conflict. If you remove all forms of territorial scoring and reduce it Guild vs Guild you will essentially be lining up and just fighting one another with the structures on the maps just being props for your fights.

There have been problems with the WvW kill and death tracking in the API since the implementation of PPK.

It looks like the erratic behavior has been eliminated BUT for some reason the values for kills and deaths reset around the EU WvW reset time. I suspect that the values will reset again during the NA reset but the interruption creates problems for developers kill tracking.

Sirendor.1394:

My point is that World vs. World as we have it now is inherently flawed. There is no balance at all, which makes some servers overpopulated while others are completely dead. Someone (I forgot who) made a thread about their server Crystal Desert having three people against a whole blob. I simply do not believe ANYONE is pleased with a situation like that. I know some people like to PvDoor, but come on, if that’s what you like to do, you’re probably better off playing PvE or EotM.

My point is that population balance, along with many poor design decisions – such as overpowered gimmicks, overpowered elite specs, maps filled with pve – is slowly but surely killing this game mode. What I propose is taking the problem at it’s root and eliminate balancing problems by allowing a predefined number of people per map.

I believe that making a Guild vs. Guild mode like it should have been made LONG ago, would actually bring back a lot of players who are interested in that kind of thing. Would it kill WvW? Maybe initially it would, but it has been dying for years.

And as you say (and I already pointed out earlier) big group debuffs are as bad as they are good, so they’re not the right way to go.

You would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater with your plan.

Capture activity drives spontaneous fights. I have data to support this claim. I’m all for Anet giving GvG a place to call home, however I am against destroying the larger strategic WvW concept for simple tactical arena fights.

Alliances fix most of the problems with balance while preserving the strategic component and should be considered before outright ditching WvW for fights fights fights.

Arcan Soulstorm.4356:

TorquedSoul.8097:

Arcan Soulstorm.4356:

I can’t recall what the problem was, but I had a reason to dismiss your data from february as inaccurate. Might be because back then EU and NA weren’t seperated properly. (€: discovered my old post, shouldn’t be as bad as I thought, but was still sceptical) I had a total of 715k kills in that week.

However, based on the stats I collected for that week and this weeks statistics (will post tomorrow), I would support a decrease of roughly 30%.

The drop in kills was due to some resets (flushes) of the values during the week. I seriously doubt that kills dropped that much, they are just being misreported.

I believe one of those is the grand flush for EU headstart stats during NA reset. (At most 90k kills, likely much less, perhaps 50-60k) But this reset was present one month ago as well, therefore we should be able to compare these numbers.

Have you noticed some more resets?

There was some sort of reset around Monday of last week. A quick glance at some of this weeks data revealed smooth curve. I will know for sure once the week is over and I process the data. Prior to last week, the numbers were bouncing all over the place.

Arcan Soulstorm.4356:

I can’t recall what the problem was, but I had a reason to dismiss your data from february as inaccurate. Might be because back then EU and NA weren’t seperated properly. (€: discovered my old post, shouldn’t be as bad as I thought, but was still sceptical) I had a total of 715k kills in that week.

However, based on the stats I collected for that week and this weeks statistics (will post tomorrow), I would support a decrease of roughly 30%.

The drop in kills was due to some resets (flushes) of the values during the week. I seriously doubt that kills dropped that much, they are just being misreported.

The API has been flaky in its reporting of kills and deaths since the implementation of PPK. It was still a problem last week. But (keep your fingers crossed) the early week data from this week looks like they may have fixed the problem.

Tongku.5326:

TorquedSoul.8097:

Osu.6307:

TorquedSoul.8097:

I would worry that servers would play in bursts to gain a lead and then sandbag, intentionally keep the population low, so that other servers couldn’t make a comeback. I think this could easily be manipulated by clever servers or alliances.

One more reason to have a fight league with substantial guild and individual rewards, and only minimal server rewards. No points means no gaming the system. Let us play with like-minded players rather than deal with this cancerous ppt mentality.

There is nothing cancerous about PPT. Maybe you don’t like the play style but it is not fundamentally bad. All you do by saying such things is illustrate how strong your bias is.

PPT leads to more fights, whether you like it or not.

And I still agree that Anet should give the GvG crowd and arena to have their fair fights. But that does not mean that capture oriented play/scoring should be eliminated.

You are incorrect.

The fundimental flaw of PPT is that empty unattended structures / objectives continue to reward for absolute zero effort, zero activity, zero player involvement. And that needs to be fixed, it is a huge flaw.

You are correct that objectives draw fights and provide most interesting ones, far moreso then GVG. There is just simply nothing better in WVW then an underdog group taking out a much bigger group via use of tactics and coordination. Having done my share of GVGs, I can say GVGs and their “fair” approach can’t even remotely hold a candle to this. They’re not even in the same league.

Personally, I found GVGs to be extremely boring and the GVG playerbase at least in part hostile to other players in WVW as well as being extremely hypocritical and often unable to perform on levels of more straight out WVW oriented or zerg busting guilds. While not all of them fit this, many do.

To keep players drawn objectives for fights, I would use a PPC rather then PPT system, where both points per capture and points per defense provide multitudes greater rewards then they do currently, both in terms of score for the server as well as personal rewards.

In fact, in addition I would tie personal rewards into the server score. For example, if player X completes a reward track which includes both objective and player kills, then that completion could also award X number of points for the server. If enough players on a server complete such, then it can alter the total outcome, and add to that I would give scoring bonuses if the track / achievement / event or whatever is completed in large part while under the effect of outmanned buff.

In this way, people would have a great positive incentive to congregate and fight over objectives, as well as being rewarded for actual participation instead of “just being present”.

We have discussed the notion of PPC earlier in the thread and I think it is a pretty good idea particularly when scaled to tier. And having points for upgrades achieved while keeping the points from yak deliveries as a milder form of PPT that can be contested by killing yaks and taking camps.

When I say PPT I generally mean capture activity. I will be more careful with my use of the term.

Chaba.5410:

This “overall activity level” is what exactly? More fights? More people? PPT implying fights? Doesn’t the scoring system and glicko rating already tell us overall activity levels and is a better reflection of actual server activity than a simple list of “server capture activity”?

The overall activity levels are defined, in my case, by the data points I am provided in the API. Nothing more. If you don’t find the data useful, ignore it.

Does the glicko rating do a better job of telling us what current activity levels are? No. Glicko is an error correction system. A spike in activity may lead to a win, but it will take a long time before any dramatic and consistent changes in behavior will be properly placed by the Anet’s current implementation of glicko. This is why we witnessed such a slow crawl by Dragonbrand up the tiers.

The Glicko is likely to never precisely say anything. Usually error correction systems dont reach a true value, they just oscillate around it. Glicko is intended to allow for competitive match ups … and as many have said … the current implementation isn’t doing a very good job of that mostly because the superficial walls between tiers slows down movement too much and drastic changes in population can quickly leave a competing server in the same glicko range outmatched.

I address the problem with glicko in another post.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Error-in-WvW-Glicko-Scoring

Chaba.5410:

TorquedSoul.8097:

Dusty Moon.4382:

Well, this is PPT data and the servers that do only PPT rate high. The servers that want fights, are low or are dying (FA being a prime example).

PPT activity implies fights. Activity is activity. Kills and deaths follow capture rates and volume.

There may be a few exceptions to this but I would guess not many.

You present a ranked list of captures by server. Then you use it to imply that this ranked list implies fights by server. When asked about kills and deaths, you present charts with the data rearranged by tier rather than by server. So basically you are just saying what everyone already knows; higher tiers have higher levels of activity. You essentially say nothing about individual servers other than show which ones spend more of their time capping objectives over fighting.

What I have held is that PPT play drives fights. The exact numbers of kills and deaths on a particular server isn’t important as the overall conflict created by capture activity.

And just so you know … it takes at least two servers two have a fight. So I think grouping the activity by tier is a good way to express overall activity levels. In addition capture levels tend to be calibrated by the server with the lowest activity level so a weekly capture volume isn’t indicative of a servers capacity to cap. But I wasn’t arguing that. It was just a list of capture volumes.

You seem to think that I posted activity levels show who was “better” … that was not it. I simply posted it to see what type of discussion it would drum up.

I think you think I am arguing something I am not arguing.

Chaba.5410:

TorquedSoul.8097:

Skynet.7201:

Chaba.5410:

TorquedSoul.8097:

Skynet.7201:

PPT doesn’t give us a kitten clue about the actual number of people playing.

I never said it did. It is possible that thousands log in and never capture anything. The only activity I’m measuring is capture volume. Not sure why that upsets you.

Considering that he replied after you said “PPT activity implies fights”, I agree with him.

Sometimes you have to remind people of statements they posted.

You referenced the number of people “playing” not specifically fighting. So your argument is fundamentally flawed there. And as I said fights are correlated to PPT. But some people prefer to use their anecdotal evidence rather than actual data. And you can do that, but I am going to put the data in front of you to force you into a more delusional state.

The first chart shows that killing (aka fights) is strongly correlated to capture activity. The correlation is 0.98.

The second chart shows that not only is fighting correlated to capture activity, but that the rate of the fighting increases with capture activity. that is, the proportion of kills to caps increases as caps increase. (correlation 0.94)

The only conclusion that can be reached from this data is that capture activity drives fights.

The data used in the charts was last weeks NA data.

Charts are meaningless because your capture activity is by server while your kill totals are by tier.

hwat? you should read the axis labels on the charts. It is the total tier capture volume vs total tier kills.

So … not meaningless.

How they relate to the original charts is irrelevant.

The fact remains that capture activity drives fights.

Osu.6307:

TorquedSoul.8097:

I would worry that servers would play in bursts to gain a lead and then sandbag, intentionally keep the population low, so that other servers couldn’t make a comeback. I think this could easily be manipulated by clever servers or alliances.

One more reason to have a fight league with substantial guild and individual rewards, and only minimal server rewards. No points means no gaming the system. Let us play with like-minded players rather than deal with this cancerous ppt mentality.

There is nothing cancerous about PPT. Maybe you don’t like the play style but it is not fundamentally bad. All you do by saying such things is illustrate how strong your bias is.

PPT leads to more fights, whether you like it or not.

And I still agree that Anet should give the GvG crowd and arena to have their fair fights. But that does not mean that capture oriented play/scoring should be eliminated.

Skynet.7201:

Chaba.5410:

TorquedSoul.8097:

Skynet.7201:

PPT doesn’t give us a kitten clue about the actual number of people playing.

I never said it did. It is possible that thousands log in and never capture anything. The only activity I’m measuring is capture volume. Not sure why that upsets you.

Considering that he replied after you said “PPT activity implies fights”, I agree with him.

Sometimes you have to remind people of statements they posted.

You referenced the number of people “playing” not specifically fighting. So your argument is fundamentally flawed there. And as I said fights are correlated to PPT. But some people prefer to use their anecdotal evidence rather than actual data. And you can do that, but I am going to put the data in front of you to force you into a more delusional state.

The first chart shows that killing (aka fights) is strongly correlated to capture activity. The correlation is 0.98.

The second chart shows that not only is fighting correlated to capture activity, but that the rate of the fighting increases with capture activity. that is, the proportion of kills to caps increases as caps increase. (correlation 0.94)

The only conclusion that can be reached from this data is that capture activity drives fights.

The data used in the charts was last weeks NA data.

Chaba.5410:

TorquedSoul.8097:

Skynet.7201:

PPT doesn’t give us a kitten clue about the actual number of people playing.

I never said it did. It is possible that thousands log in and never capture anything. The only activity I’m measuring is capture volume. Not sure why that upsets you.

Considering that he replied after you said “PPT activity implies fights”, I agree with him.

Well fights can be measured in kills and deaths. I am pretty sure that kills and deaths tend to be correlated to PPT. Once Anet fixes api I will be able to show that easily enough. Until then we can just disagree.

Skynet.7201:

PPT doesn’t give us a kitten clue about the actual number of people playing.

I never said it did. It is possible that thousands log in and never capture anything. The only activity I’m measuring is capture volume. Not sure why that upsets you.

Link.1049:

The people who don’t want any sort of ppt basically just want PvP.

They want sGvG … structured Guild vs Guild.

And Anet should give it to them.

Osu.6307:

I don’t think fight guilds want an arena. We already have arenas in our guild halls. Fighting on wvw maps is more fun. We like using terrain, setting up ambushes, coordinating with other guilds, etc. If you think we MUST have some arbitrary point system, one is as good as another. I wouldn’t get rid of EBG or keeps and towers, as long as there is some sort of incentive in place that rewards fighting for the objective, not just sitting on it.

Fight guilds can already fight on the map. So what is the problem? That fights alone don’t win the week?

If I were a fight guild, I would encourage all fight guilds to move to the lower tiers so that they can control and regulate the PPT and have their fights and set their siege ground rules and GvG to their hearts content. Let the PPT players hold the upper tiers and backcap each other ad nauseam.

Osu.6307:

You’ll never fix PPT so its no use trying. Too many players would have strokes if they were told they actually have to use their weapons instead of siege. The best thing anet could do is create a new “league” that caters to the wants of fight-focused players, and let those players transfer. PPT’ers and fighters are so far apart in terms of wants and needs that it is better to just let them self-segregate.

How you do points is difficult. How do you reward one side for winning a battle? Should you get more points for winning against a larger force? Probably? Should you lose points for running away? It depends. Let’s face it, PPT is a really really easy scoring system for anet. One that rewards actually fighting is difficult. I’d suggest that if anet actually created a fight league, points per side/faction/server would be unnecessary. I would argue that my guild and most of the people I play with could really care less about points, so why do we even need a points system? It would make more sense to instead reward individual players with the kind of loot that is awarded in spvp-style reward tracks.

I agree they should give fight guilds an arena. However ditching the strategic element of territorial control is a bit narrow minded given that some of us like that sort of game.

Again, this notion of it must be one or the other (Fights vs PPT/territorial control) is not productive.

Dusty Moon.4382:

Well, this is PPT data and the servers that do only PPT rate high. The servers that want fights, are low or are dying (FA being a prime example).

PPT activity implies fights. Activity is activity. Kills and deaths follow capture rates and volume.

There may be a few exceptions to this but I would guess not many.

Aezyr.5304:

In addition you get points for killing dolyaks and sentries. So there are indeed other sources for the war score. Before PPK enabled it was around 30% points not from tick.
I don’t know the current share but I would guess it will be around 40%.

I have data analysis from before and after the addition of PPK. Prior to PPK about 60% of the points came from PPT. The other 40% was from yak delievers, yak kills, and vets … but the bulk of those points was yaks. I was able to approximate score within a 2% error.
You can see it on the front page of the linked pdf: PPSC is Points Per Supply Caravan. This is passive scoring that occurs from yak supply deliveries. Total is my estimated total and Actual is actual final score.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/w27c6nhj4x7rz7t/2016-01-03.report.pdf?dl=0
After the implementation of PPK the error jumped as can be seen on a more recent report:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/hn8juejc6kja2zu/2016-03-06_1-1.report.pdf?dl=0

Since the API is currently not reporting Kills and Deaths accurately I cannot at this time incorporate the kills into my calculation. But you can tell by the jump in the error which is between 8% and 11% in some cases that this is likely what the PPK contribution to score is.

EDIT: What I am beginning to think is that something like PPSC could be used to supplant PPT since it essentially just adds on to the territorial score. So Ditching PPT for PPSC + Points per Capture(PPC) + Points for Objective Upgrades(PPU) and PPK might actually be a good system.

If Anet ever fixes the kills in the API I could approximate what the scores would look like under this type of system. It would be nice to have yak delivers and kill in the API.

Jana.6831:

I really think having a dynamic “PPT” depending on how many players on each side would be the best idea – with the bigger group still having a slight advantage.

I would worry that servers would play in bursts to gain a lead and then sandbag, intentionally keep the population low, so that other servers couldn’t make a comeback. I think this could easily be manipulated by clever servers or alliances.

Calanthe.3857:

You could do away with PPT if you changed scoring to PPK and PP upgrades (while the structure is held continuously) and a smaller amount for capture. Upgrades should count most. Points for upgrades alone would give people a reason to defend. (: ] ) Also, points per dolyak delivery.

Points per Capture + Points per Upgrade + Points per Kill would probably be a good system. The differences in capture rates are generally pretty small but having scaled rewards for reaching different tiers creates the need to attack and defend. There would still be a problem with night capping where the upgrades can happen without confrontations. But they could possible calibrate the yak spawn rate to the map population so that fast upgrades would only happen when the maps are active.

There is no reason to do away with yak kills/deliveries or vet kills. That keeps the roamers and small havoc groups happy.

XTD’s idea about increasing the cap reward for the tier of the objective would also put pressure on people to defend objectives. So taking a tier 3 keep and getting upgraded to tier 3 would be worth much more than just flipping a tier 1 keep back and forth.

Lapiy.7160:

Yet most of the people who played wvw where fights focused players and guilds as the decline of the gamemode has shown. Many of the best fights where off in keeps and towers as you tried to stop the massive blob from taking it or breaking into there keep’s just to pick a fight with whoever was inside. Raiding was one of the if not the biggest part of wvw and would bring 2-3 map queues of people on the bl’s every night to take part in the open field and keep fights. Not catering to the raid guilds that made wvw what it was would be crazy and for many of them raiding was more important then GvG’ing.

I think they should keep PPT AND give the GvG players an arena. I really don’t care for the “it must be one or the other” thinking. Its a bit of a false dilemma.

Xenesis.6389:

Need to just drop any type of scoring because the populations will never be on near equal conditions, which they need to be for competitive scoring. The only servers that were even close to that were maybe the T1/T2 servers at one point when they could queue up all 4 maps for long periods of time.

There are a few other rvr/wvw games that have done it without scoring, Dark age of camelot, planetside, warhammer online, etc. They would of course need to implement something to drive players to play for. Daoc had artifacts for players to capture for bonus stats, planetside had bases to capture for bonuses such as access to certain weapons or vehicles they also used a lattice system so you had to capture certain bases before others which funneled players into fights, warhammer you had to capture keeps and lock down zones in order to work your way into eventually attacking the opposing sides main city.

They cannot control the population unless they go to an eotm system which will allow all sides to draw on a large pool of players into a population capped play area, especially if it’s the rumored factions version which will allow them to draw upon all players without server/side limitations.

Only other thing to do is control scoring, time slice scoring, which would limit time zones to compete with themselves and minimize the effects of night capping.

The alliance/merc model would allow equal populations to go against each other. I don’t know if they should attempt to alliances of 5000 players, but 1500-2000 might be reasonable (something like 4-10 guilds)

Calanthe.3857:

Ok, I understand your points. Let me explain what happened in Rift Conquest: control points were flipped, then flipped back, and factions kept flipping points until they got enough to reach the threshold. Of course, each faction kept losing control of many points because it was very difficult defend them (and there were like 40), but that already happens in WvW….

TorquedSoul.8097:

On the same note, the need for people to engage in unhealthy “cancerous” behavior would increase not decrease because now a 24/7 vigil would be required to guard territory.

Its more a result of competitive behavior than game design. The grinders will always win a large scale game because insane persistence is required. Organization, strategy and skill can help a little, but the ambitious player will always outwork you.

X T D.6458:

The problem is not so much about PPT being a part of WvW, its that the scoring system is outdated and does not reflect the dynamic nature of wvw. Things like backcapping, nightcapping, ktraining etc w/e you want to call it ruins a lot of effort people make towards generating points for their server and simply leaves a bad taste in players mouths for this type of gameplay choosing instead to just go for fights and not care about PPT or scores.

One of the problems with the current scoring system is that it is imbalanced, why is a paper keep worth the same as a fully upgraded keep? I have proposed several times that this needs to be reworked by making scoring reflect the upgrade of the objective, the more upgraded it is the more points its worth.

For example
t1 keep-10 PPT
t2 keep- 15 PPT
t3 keep- 25 PPT

There should also be some kind of PPC system. We have all been in that situation, where you spend an hour taking a fully upgraded keep defended by a blob, and just happened to cap it right after the tick, and 5 minutes later…its gone, and you got nothing for it. At least with PPC, which should also reflect the upgrade scoring system I mentioned, every time you capture something you can contribute to your server.

I could see how a PPC + PPT + PPK could be a partial solution.

However ditching PPT altogether would remove any sense of urgency. And PPC will just create a backcapping race. If you look at my activity charts, the people that win PPT would still win PPC. The PPT to capture efficiency represents less than 10% error in outcomes.

And this system would still have the problems associated with population imbalances across servers and time zones.

@Calanthe

All I’m saying is that if you stick that format into a week long event you end up with something much worse than PPT.

It doesn’t resolve the primary problems with PPT that off hours capping gives an advantage.

If the game ends when someone reaches a control threshold then some games will be ridiculously short and probably end in the middle of the night when few people are playing.

On the same note, the need for people to engage in unhealthy “cancerous” behavior would increase not decrease because now a 24/7 vigil would be required to guard territory.

My goal here isn’t to solve the PPT problem but rather to show the “negatives” that people associate with PPT are really just a consequence of a week long open world game involving large numbers of people.

Short of shrinking the game down to what you suggested you are not likely to fix some of the major complaints.

However fixing the population imbalance and integrating NA and EU resolves most of problems people associate with PPT. Unequal force and timezone shenanigans.

lmperdigao.2567:

ANet doesn’t carry much about servers stacking or not. Server transfer fees are only there for revenue.

Given the state of the game, it might be wise for Anet to allow players some latitude with how they interact with the game mode since at the moment the mode is a bit broken.

Players struck on servers which are a bit fit for them or abandoned on servers when everyone else leaves might think that $20 transfer fee might best be spent on a new game.

Most problems with WvW would be resolved if you greatly reduced the scope. But then we really aren’t talking about the same thing anymore.

What you are describing above is a slightly bigger version of a sPvP match which would probably look more like GvGvG than WvW.

Serious.7083:

Problem starts with there being two radically different groups of people mixed in the same area.

PPK/GvG people don’t want to defend locations like keeps and towers, they just want to generally ‘have good fights’ and preferably beat the enemy into the ground. Often you will find guild groups just running around ignoring any call to defend or help capture anything. Most have no real interest in points or scoring or WvW in it’s present form.

PPT people take over keeps and towers then place siege, their aim is to keep the enemy out and keep the points rolling in. They will immediately go to a tower that’s under attack and defend it. WvW was seemingly designed for PPT people.

Each group has issues with the other’s mode of play, you will not find a simple option that allows both groups to always play harmoniously together.

What is needed is another large scale PvP game mode that is purely for GvG/PPK people. WvW is not really suitable for them and a different option would be preferred.

This is why I bring this up. WvW is PPT. There is no escaping that fact.

The bulk of the complaints about the game mode come from fight guilds who are looking for some sort of structure in WvW to have a ‘fair’ fight which is never going to happen.

The point of PPT is to generate territorial disputes that lead to fun fights. However the problems with balancing server populations and timezone populations makes this unlikely in the games current state.

Anet should give the fight guilds a structured arena. I think they will still participate in WvW but will be more accepting of what WvW is and not try to turn it into something it is not.

I still believe the problem with PPT is population balance both across servers and timezones. And no amount of fixing fight mechanics is going to fix WvW current problems. It may make fight guilds happy because they are not actually playing the game of WvW … they are just looking for fights.

But my experience has shown that just about every time a fight commander loses a fight it is somehow Anet’s fault. And every now and again a fight commander will win in spite of Anet.

Short of giving every fight commander a “me win” button, they will always claim that more balancing is required to make the game exactly they way it needs to be for them personally to win. Essentially the are asking Anet to adjust the game to their style of tactics.

The futility of the situation grows daily.

Caliburn.1845:

API data tracking more accurately now, at least for the moment.

http://coveragewars2.com/death.php

T1 having significantly more kills/deaths than T2.

My understanding is that the kill and death tracking in the API is currently broken. Unless they fixed it since last week. Lasts weeks data was still flakey. Are those charts up to date?

I personally don’t think that eliminating all forms of territorial scoring in WvW is possible.

But I have heard quite a few comments about ditching it and I’m curious what you would replace it with.

Points per Cap may eliminate the disproportionate advantage of off hours capping, but doesn’t change the fact that those that like to PvD will still have the advantage. The score difference may not be as pronounce but the advantage would be.

Dumping for PPK doesn’t work as PPK is a function of activity not skill. So the more active servers will simply have more kills.

Using KDR doesn’t work either as it really doesn’t scale and will generally encourage score oriented forces to take positions where they can get the most defensive advantage (i.e bunker/siege up.)

Those are the three that I have considered, what are your thoughts?

Meadfreek.6789:

Re: server population

I’ve read rumors in various places the you may be thinking of disbanding servers in WvW in favor of guild alliances v guild alliance.

Even if that rumor is 100% wrong it is vital you don’t turn WvW into “Join a huge guild or guild alliance or gtfo”. With the scribed banners and the airship, etc. It is already going too far down that path.

I belong a small guild of real life friends. Intentionally. I really don’t want to join a big, impersonal guild. Even though I could belong to both guilds at once. I know many people in similar situations with similar opinions.

Huge guilds often require you represent them 24/7 or insist you play a certain way or certain spec to fit in with their style. Similarly, if you require guild alliances then peer pressure comes into play. “You’re only have a couple hours to play and you want to play PvE or work on your crafting? Too bad! Our alliance needs you in WvW. Now!” People already have jobs. Most won’t tolerate being ordered around in a game.

The implementation of alliances that I referenced made accommodations for small guilds and individuals that were not a part of a formal alliances. They would could be used a reserves and could be recruited by guilds on a as needed basis. I would expect the higher ranked alliances to not need this support but there would be plenty of middle and lower tier activity for militia.

Aphs.9528:

Tier 1
Yak’s Bend – Kills: 13,080
Jade Quarry-Kills: 9,065
Blackgate-Kills: 8,101

Total tier 1 kills —- (30,246 )
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
Tier2
Tarnished Coast-Kills: 23,555
Dragonbrand-kills: 15,208
Fort Aspenwood-Kills: 13,209

Total tier 2 kills —- (51,972)

Seems tier 2 is more active and perhaps Anet can see this and give us 1 random match up a month ? Pretty sure people would be excited about fighting new people once in a while.

I posted the cap levels in another thread. Both TC and DB had higher activity levels than BG. You are right that either of these servers deserve a shot. Unfortunately it will take forever for the glicko scores to get close enough to allow this to happen. TC and DB will continue to beat up on each other slowing down the process while BG is kept up by the broken glicko scoring mechanism.

I must of missed some when copying data. probably the ones at the bottom though.

Did MO’B just say that skill balance and maps will now be a higher priority than population balance and rewards? I guess I will be hanging out in sPvP for a long while. :P

Here are some activity charts for NA and EU servers for those interested.

EDIT: I added the lower tier servers that I missed. Even my software wasn’t paying attention to them.

Until the population balance problem is resolved there is no point in them messing with the matchmaking ratings. Its pretty much a waste of time.